


The Opposite of Painful

by fringedweller



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: F/M, First Time, Humour, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-23
Updated: 2010-09-23
Packaged: 2017-11-23 15:58:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fringedweller/pseuds/fringedweller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Audrey works it out. She would have worked it out earlier, but she was busy, ok? Fantasising about your partner shirtless takes time, you know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Opposite of Painful

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta-d because it's stupidly late and [](http://seren-ccd.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://seren-ccd.livejournal.com/)**seren_ccd** is mega-busy at the moment. If I get around to writing another, I promise she'll make it better first. Many thanks to all that answered my questions about the timescale of Nathan's idiopathic neuropathy. Potential spoilers for all episodes up to number ten. In my head, touch works through clothes.

Title: The Opposite of Painful  
Author: [](http://fringedweller.livejournal.com/profile)[**fringedweller**](http://fringedweller.livejournal.com/)  
Pairing: Nathan/Audrey  
Rating: PG-13  
Disclaimer: Nothing mentioned here is mine, and I'm not making any profit from it. Oh wait, the International Elvis Impersonator Convention was my idea, which should give you some idea about the tone of this fic.  
Word count: 3828  
Summary: Audrey works it out. She would have worked it out earlier, but she was busy, ok? Fantasising about your partner shirtless takes time, you know.  
Author's Notes: Unbeta-d because it's stupidly late and [](http://seren-ccd.livejournal.com/profile)[**seren_ccd**](http://seren-ccd.livejournal.com/) is mega-busy at the moment. If I get around to writing another, I promise she'll make it better first. Many thanks to all that answered my questions about the timescale of Nathan's idiopathic neuropathy. Potential spoilers for all episodes up to number ten. In my head, touch works through clothes.

For a trained FBI agent, it took Audrey a ridiculously long time to clue in to what Nathan was doing.

In her defence, she did have other issues to contend with; there was no such thing as a normal day in Haven, even when there was a lack of supernatural events to deal with. Dave and Vince Teagues, who usually kept their bickering at a fraternal level, had fallen out over, of all things, whether or not to cover the Maine Elvis Impersonator Convention just up the road in Derry. Their infighting made it into the pages of the _Herald_ , and after a few days it started to get vicious. People complained about the _Herald_ being used to air old grievances regarding who had decapitated whose stuffed animal fifty years ago, and they complained to the local police department. Chief Wuornos refused to wade into the hornets’ nest and gave the problem to Nathan and Audrey to sort out.

After the enforced and protracted peace negotiations came a rash of pickpocketing at the Grey Gull, which involved a lot of time spent huddled inconspicuously in the darkest corner of the bar staring at patrons in an attempt to find the culprit. Then, once they had got _that_ sorted out, somebody phoned in a bomb threat to the local high school. It eventually turned out to be a couple of teenagers desperate to miss a chemistry test they hadn’t studied for, but evacuating the school of pupils and teachers and organising a search for the bomb had been tense. Haven was an hour away from the nearest bomb disposal squad, and before Audrey had time to blink her idiot partner had pulled on one of the station’s three Kevlar vests and ran into the building to hunt out the bomb.

As if Kevlar was going to stop his head from being blown off his shoulders, a fact she had yelled at him about in the relative privacy of their corner of the station house when they had returned back after the teenagers had admitted their prank. Nathan, stoic bastard that he was, had just shrugged his shoulders and said “At least it would have been painless for me.”

That had stopped her in her tracks, as his casual remarks about his condition always did.

“It wouldn’t have been painless for _me_ , watching you die,” she had fumed, eventually. “Or for your father, or for everybody else in Haven, for that matter. So don’t you dare do that again, Nathan, you understand me?”

She had been right in his face then, one determined finger prodding him hard in the chest. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t feel it. It made her feel better.

A small smile played at the corner of his lips, not committing itself fully to his face but definitely lurking on the edges.

“I promise,” he said.

She wasn’t sure that she believed him or not; no matter how close they had become since her reassignment to Haven, there was always an air of reserve around Nathan, as if he was keeping part of himself back from her and the rest of the world.

So, she could be forgiven for not noticing the touching, at first.

It started innocently; she had broken the barrier, with the spontaneous kiss on the cheek after his timely rescue of her from the Dark Man. That had seemed to push at the physical boundaries that they had set up between them – the next thing was Nathan’s sudden keenness to give high fives. It wasn’t that Audrey was against them, but for a few days, Nathan seemed _obsessed_ by them. Any opportunity to slap his palm against hers was seized, until she started to complain that her partner had turned into a teenaged boy. Then it was handshaking, and when she rolled her eyes at that, he took to guiding her, with a hand to the small of her back, whenever they entered or left a room.

Alright, the guiding thing wasn’t so bad. And it wasn’t as if she complained about the fact that when they were off-duty and walking to his favourite pancake place, he’d tuck her arm into his and let his shoulder brush against hers. It was a sweet gesture, and Audrey’s life hadn’t ever been heavy on the sweet gestures.

It certainly hadn’t been heavy on sweet gestures from tall, dark and handsome men, stoic or otherwise.

Maybe it was because she was secretly fond of the arm thing that Audrey didn’t mention anything about how he started to pull her chair out for her when they sat down, or how his fingers would drift over her shoulders as he moved to his own chair. It was a charming, old-fashioned gesture, and there hadn’t been enough of those in her life either.

She _started_ to get a clue when he started to get hyper-vigilant about stray hairs on her jacket and crumbs that fell from the warm savoury pastries from Rosemary’s bakery down onto her sweater. If it had been anybody else, she would have assumed that he was just trying to cop a cheap feel, and she would have broken his fingers accordingly, but with Nathan it was different. He never touched anything that shouldn’t be touched without dinner and a movie first, for a start, but it was more the _look_ he gave her when he had finished grooming her and stepped away. He would beam at her as if she had done something magical simply by dropping half her lunch down herself, and she couldn’t help but smile back.

Seeing Nathan smile was unusual. It wasn’t as if he was that grumpy by nature, not when you got to know him. He actually had a sense of humour, albeit a dry and sardonic one. But when Audrey thought about it, (and who was going to know exactly how much time she spent thinking about her partner, anyway?) he didn’t really have much to smile about. If you put aside the long running issues with his father, the lack of close friends and the fact that the one woman that Audrey had seen him take an interest in had run for the hills when presented with the weirdness that is Haven, Maine, there was still his condition to deal with.

Audrey hadn’t ever thought about what it would be like not to feel…well, anything. Too many years spent in state-run children’s homes had taught her that sometimes it was better not to feel anything at all. But not to realise that a pan was burning your hand, or that the water in your shower was freezing cold seemed just unimaginable to her. And worse was to be afflicted by this terrible condition, only to have to disappear and then reappear without warning.

He must wake up, she realised one day in horror, wondering if today was going to be the day that his ability to feel came back. And each day he would have to acknowledge that no, it wasn’t to be today.

She’d seen him stabbing at his hand with plastic cutlery recently, scavenged from whatever take-out place they had grabbed a meal from. She didn’t know if he was aware of doing it or not, whether stabbing absently at his palm was the equivalent of the way that she would tug at her earlobe when she was thinking of something unpleasant.

She had taken to snatching the slivers of plastic from him, frowning at him and occasionally making a disapproving noise under her breath. He’d look at her, bemused, then shrug his shoulders and one of them would abruptly start a conversation about something inane, to break the tension.

So, Audrey knew that he wasn’t lying when he said that he didn’t feel physical sensation. She had more than enough proof. But that just didn’t gel with his sudden need to be touching her all the time.

A little suspicious thought formed deep in the corner of her mind; what if he could actually feel _her_? What if some weird, Haven-esque supernatural voodoo had happened, and he could just feel her, not anybody else?

It was clear that she was going to have to do some investigating.

She started off small. Instead of whisking a file off to the decrepit photocopier that the station house should have donated to a museum long ago, Audrey took to leaning over Nathan’s shoulder instead. She let her hair slip forward and tickle the side of his face.  
He jerked slightly, frowned and moved his head, but that wasn’t exactly conclusive proof. He could have seen her out of the corner of his eye, after all.

The next time she found an excuse to stand over him, she let her hand fall casually on his shoulder. There was a slight tension of the solid muscle underneath her hand, but then he relaxed into her touch. Audrey’s eyes narrowed as his recitation of the file’s contents stuttered a little, but again, not exactly damning evidence. Having someone read over your shoulder wasn’t exactly restful, and everyone stumbled over their words occasionally.

Hmm. That muscle _was_ firm. Had he been working out?

Audrey moved back to her desk, resolutely not thinking about her partner stripped to the waist and lifting weights. Or stripped to the waist jogging along the beachfront. Or just stripped to the waist generally. It was harder than she thought it would be.

It was a while before the next opportunity for experiment presented itself. There had been reports of a spate of robberies in one of the nicer, and richer, areas of Haven and the influential locals were lobbying for some preventative policing. Because of this, the town’s small police force was spread out in unmarked vehicles on the dreaded night-time stake outs, the most boring and pointless of all police activities.

“It’s dark,” grumbled Audrey as they sat in the truck, passing a thermos of hot chocolate between them. “If they have any sense, they’ll be wearing dark clothes, and going in the back way. Unless they decide to ring the doorbell wearing neon yellow, this whole operation is an exercise in pointlessness.”

She gestured across the road to the imposing front entrance of the property that they had been told to protect and serve.

“Your dad caved too easily,” she said.

Nathan shrugged. His shoulders were very eloquent, Audrey decided, as well as firm and well-muscled. She knew that shrug meant both “I agree that this is a pointless exercise designed to please the well-heeled of the community” and “my father was in a bad position and you never know what may happen”.

They lapsed into a comfortable silence, broken only when Nathan accidentally spilt a few drops of hot chocolate onto his hand and she swore as she fished about in her pockets for something to mop up the mess with. He gave another eloquent shrug – “Don’t worry about it” – but Audrey flicked on the overhead light and saw the tell-tale reddening of Nathan’s skin as it reacted to the hot liquid. He clearly wasn’t lying about not feeling sensation.

So why then, ten minutes later when he was peering out of the window in his door, did he yelp and bang his head so violently when she leaned over and deliberately blew gently along the back of his neck?

“Hah!”Audrey said triumphantly. “I knew it! I knew you could feel me!”

“Am I bleeding?” he asked, peering at himself in the rear view mirror.

“No,” Audrey told him after a cursory check. “But you may have a bruise tomorrow. And don’t change the subject!”

She flipped on the overhead light again. He turned it off immediately, and a small battle broke out over the switch. The light flickered on and off ten or twelve times before Nathan slapped his larger hand firmly over the switch.

“Can we leave it off?” he begged, and the sheer embarrassment and nervousness in his voice won her over. Audrey had only been in Haven a few months, but those were not emotions she associated with her friend.

In their fight over the light, neither noticed the curtains of the house under their surveillance twitch.

“So,” Audrey began, then tailed off.

“Yeah,” Nathan agreed, blowing out a long breath.

“Just me?” Audrey said in the darkness, her heart rate starting to pick up a little. From across the cab of the truck, she could feel his eyes burn into her.

“Just you,” he confirmed. He paused, then his voice sounded a little less confident. “You do believe me, right?”

“I do,” she said automatically, and then again, more firmly. “I do believe you, Nathan. If I needed any proof, I saw your skin redden when you burned yourself.”

“I wouldn’t have noticed it unless you had said something,” he said helplessly. “But when you held my hand to steady it, God, Audrey, it was like electricity shooting up my arm.”

Audrey frowned. “Painful?”

“No!” he said, leaning over and taking her hand again. Although the overhead light was off, she could see the outlines of his face by the glow cast by the tasteful streetlamps. His eyes positively gleamed in the dim light, and his face held an animation that she had never seen before.

It was as if he had come alive, just at the touch of her hand.

She looked down at their joined hands. He gripped hers firmly, as if she was going to pull away at any moment. She consciously relaxed her body, letting the tension drift away from her muscles. He relaxed a little too. They sat there in the darkness, holding hands and looking at each other from the corner of their eyes.

“It’s the opposite of painful, actually,” he said eventually.

A small smile played on her lips. That had been a hard-won confession.

“Well, good,” she said. “I hate to think that the only person you can feel would cause you pain.” She paused for a minute, and then grinned at him in the darkness. “Hey, does this mean it’ll hurt if I pinch you now?”

“I don’t...” he began, then abandoned speech as she gleefully launched herself at him. He fended her off to the best of his ability in the cramped confines of the cab, but she still got a few good pinches in before he wriggled one hand underneath her sweater and tickled her lightly on the ribs.

“Stop that!” she shrieked, but all that got her was a wicked smile and a continuation. She shifted position to launch a tickle-attack of her own, her competitive instincts kicking in.  
The thermos went flying, as did their copy of the file on the robberies. Somebody’s stray foot sounded the horn, somebody’s flailing arm knocked the windscreen wipers to full pelt. Somehow in the melee Nathan managed to use his superior upper body strength to pin her to the seat, trapping her arms at her side. They were both panting at laughing simultaneously, until Nathan shifted slightly. His eyes grew wide in panic, and he tried to move away. Unfortunately, during their tickle fight Audrey had wound her legs around his, effectively pinning him to her. Any movement on his part just made the situation worse. Or better, depending on your opinion of the subject.

Audrey thought it was fantastic.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Audrey wasn’t interested in what was no doubt going to be a stammering apology and some abject mortification. She had always been of the opinion that mysteries should be explored and opportunities seized, the character quirk that had landed her in Haven to begin with. Now that one had landed in her lap, so to speak, there was no way she was going to let it go.

 _Especially_ when this particular mystery wore sweaters so well.

So, to cut off apologies and embarrassment, Audrey did the practical thing, levered herself up onto one elbow, grabbed the back of his head and kissed him soundly.

It took him by surprise, and he didn’t respond immediately. Audrey was about to pull away, mortified at the prospect of accidentally sexually harassing her partner, when he suddenly decided that kissing her back was the sensible thing to do.

She half expected him to be awkward and unsure; she knew that bar a few years in his teens, he had always suffered from idiopathic neuropathy. He must have made up for lost time when he was younger, she decided between hungry kisses, because there was nothing awkward or unsure about his kiss, or the way that his hands roamed purposefully across her body.

She raked her nails through his hair and he groaned at the sensation on his scalp. She teased him for a minute or two, before shifting slightly letting her hands slip up under his sweater. She cursed the darkness for blocking her view of his body, but firm muscles quivered under her sure strokes. She brought a hand down with a playful slap to his behind, and he let out a very un-Nathan like yelp before snickering in her ear and nipping at her earlobe.

Her hips rotated; his thrust forward. The resulting groans of pleasure from both of them just encouraged more movement.

His lips had shifted away from hers, and he was exploring the sensitive skin of her neck with obvious enjoyment. There wasn’t enough room for them to do much beyond some seriously passionate kissing and a little light groping, but it was as if the world outside the truck had disappeared from their thoughts completely.

The outside world returned with a crash, however, when the radio crackled and the husky tones of Laverne broke into their frenzied kissing.

“Report of a suspicious vehicle outside 37 Beachcomber Drive,” she honked across the airwaves. “All cars proceed to Beachcomber Drive.”

“Beachcomber Drive,” Audrey said through a haze of lust. “Why is that familiar?”

“I don’t care,” Nathan muttered, fiddling with the fastening on her bra.

Audrey lost herself to his kisses again, and ignored the radio. However, it was much harder to ignore the squealing tyres of all the other bored police officers who had raced from their peaceful stations to see some action. They had not expected the action that they found, however.

“Shit,” said Nathan eloquently as the headlights lit up the cab of the truck.

“Where did you put my bra?” demanded Audrey as she hurriedly groped about the floor of the truck for her discarded sweater.

Nathan didn’t have time to answer before the excited shouts of the Haven police department surrounded the truck and the sound of multiple safeties being released made them throw their hands into the air. Ever the gentleman, he moved in front of Audrey to shield her from the amused stares of the other police officers.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way your dad won’t find out about this?” Audrey sighed.

“He’s the one with the camera,” Nathan said resignedly.

They looked at each other solemnly for a moment, before bursting into fits of laughter. Their clothes were awry, their hair dishevelled and their lips swollen with kisses. Audrey had a serious case of stubble-burn and Nathan was sporting the beginning of a fine love-bite on the base of his neck. He seemed ignorant of the reddened mark, so Audrey thought it best not to tell him.

His hand snuck out across the seat and grabbed hers.

“I’d want to do this even if I couldn’t feel you,” he said quietly. “I’ve been tempted to kiss you ever since I pulled you out of that car.”

She squeezed his hand hard, and his face lit up when he realised he could feel it.

“I...” she began, then frowned and looked past his shoulder. “Nathan,” she said urgently. “Look over at the side of the house. Do you see what I see?”

He turned to peer out of the window, past the collection of cops who were standing around in a loose huddle, laughing at the state Nathan and Audrey had found themselves in. The owners of number 37 had joined the group outside, and had left the front door to their property wide open. And, taking advantage of the distraction, three lithe figures in black were sneaking in through the inviting doorway.

“If we catch them while your dad and the rest of the team are standing around laughing at us, we’ll have the last word,” Audrey said with a grin.

“What are we waiting for?” Nathan replied, easing his door open quietly.

They snuck away from the impromptu party at the side of the street and made their way into number 37. They cornered the first thief in the downstairs cloakroom, rifling through the handbags and coat pockets looking for car keys. They left him handcuffed in a closet while they moved silently upstairs, surprising the rest of the group who were busy stuffing jewellery into their pockets in the master bedroom.

It was worth the embarrassment of their discovery to watch the faces of the Chief and the rest of the team drop as they proudly marched the three recalcitrant robbers towards some uniformed officers.

“I think you’ll find that _we’ve_ caught the men you were looking for while _you’ve_ been standing around chatting,” Audrey said in her best snotty FBI tone. “So you’ll understand if we leave you to process them.”

“Have fun,” Nathan said cheerfully, pushing the larger of the thieves into the back of one of the police cars.

They hopped back into the truck and pulled away into the night, a respectable distance between them. As soon as they had put a few minutes between themselves and the rest of their colleagues, Audrey unbuckled her seatbelt and slid closer along the seat until Nathan could drop an arm around her shoulders.

“You know it’s illegal to travel in a moving vehicle in Maine without wearing a seat belt,” he said mildly, tugging her closer into his body.

“You’ll just have to arrest me then,” she purred, reaching up to drop a quick kiss on his jawline. “Go on, Detective Wuornos, frisk me. I’ve been wanting you to do that since you pulled me out of that rental car.”

She waited for a moment, and then added, sadly, “It’s a shame that we both had to use our cuffs at the crime scene.”

He snorted with laughter, and pulled her even closer to him, steering with one hand on the wheel as he trailed his hand through the loose strands of hair that escaped her hasty ponytail.

“There’s no way that you’re going to keep me from touching you,” he said flatly.

“Hurry up, then,” Audrey commanded. “We’ve got months of wasted time to catch up on.”

Nathan actually broke the speed limit getting them back to his house, but as there was a lack of police cars on the roads of Haven than night, nobody noticed.

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